"Another round of goat's milk, garcon!"

There are a lot of great places to buy fresh vegetables and meat for the table with a strong discount compared to the grocery stores in our area. Pittsburgh's cost of living is reasonable and the surrounding farms bring in fresh food of all kinds making living here all the more pleasurable.

My fiance has a treasure map of locations with the freshest foods at the lowest cost. You just have to know what to get. And where. In order to maximize the savings.
Meat can be procured just out of town by a butcher that is supplied by the local farms. The Co-op, five minutes from our home, has great herbs and seasonings of all kinds including "Thai" and "Jamaican" which I swear can be used in place of agent orange for chemical warfare by taking your breath away once exposed to the air and imbedding microscopic pepper powder down your throat causing you or anyone else who passes down the store aisle to cough and sneeze for minutes on end. But when rubbed into vegetables or meat..c'est magnifique!!
We have Farmers' Markets all over Pittsburgh where you can get goat cheese, goat milk, as well as homemade jellies from the Amish farmers who bring them in from their farms in rural Pennsylvania. There's also great veggies, so crisp and fresh they are like eating your way through a vegan version of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory gone Amazon forest style! Crunchy giant carrots and fresh plump tomatoes. Chris has been randomly picking untried vegetables and learning how to throw them together and serve them up with an assortment of presentational formats.

She's been cooking everything from scratch using the ingredients from our city wide treasure hunt.
Fresh carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. Raw veggies from the farms. Organic teas.

We are even taking a class with "Grow Pittsburgh" http://www.growpittsburgh.org/growpittsburgh/
and learning to garden our own food in our backyard. I didn't know that there were so many ways to grow food. Even if you live in an apartment complex!

Now that the pantry is full and so are our bellies...we can focus on creating the projects we want and the life we want to live.
"Another round of goat's milk, garcon! Merci."